Andersonstown

Andersonstown, a district of West Belfast above the Falls Road and beneath Black Mountain, is more than a backdrop in the histories of the Price and McConville families. Its streets and homes mark the movement from family inheritance into armed republican activity, while its changing boundaries show how conflict reorganized everyday life. The Price home on Slievegallion Drive served first as a household steeped in republican memory, then as the place where Dolours Price formally joined the IRA, and finally as the setting for the wake held after her death.

Setting and Community

Andersonstown sits above the Falls Road, at the foot of the flat-topped Black Mountain overlooking Belfast. In the years when the conflict intensified, the district was part of a Catholic republican stronghold. Its position was not merely geographical: the parallel routes of the Falls Road and the Shankill Road, and the narrow streets connecting them, divided the city into adjoining Catholic and Protestant territories. During the 1969 riots, barricades made those divisions more definite; later, barriers known as peace walls physically separated communities.

The neighbourhood’s political character developed through daily experience as well as inherited belief. Army raids in Andersonstown searched for IRA suspects and weapons, while a local house was used as a clandestine bomb school for Provisional IRA recruits. Residents resented the authorities’ incursions, and the presence of armed representatives of the British crown reinforced the sense that Belfast was an occupied city. In that atmosphere, opposition could become communal practice: when authorities approached, women and children struck metal dustbin lids against the pavement to warn rebels that a raid was under way; children also whistled from street corners at the first sign of trouble. The district appears as a place where political solidarity was enacted through ordinary homes, streets, and improvised signals.

The Price Home and Republican Inheritance

The Price family lived in a small, semi-detached council house on Slievegallion Drive. Albert Price worked as an upholsterer, making the chairs in the cramped front room, but the family’s most conspicuous display was not domestic comfort: photographs taken in prisons occupied a place of pride. Albert and Chrissie Price believed that Britain occupied Ireland and that Irish people had a duty to expel the British by any means necessary. For Dolours, those convictions were part of childhood life. She sat on her father’s lap as he recounted joining the IRA in the 1930s and going to England as a teenager to take part in a bombing raid. He also told his daughters about escaping from a jail in Derry with twenty other prisoners through a tunnel, while an inmate played bagpipes to cover the noise.

Dolours and her younger sister Marian grew up closely bound to one another in this household. In the wider neighbourhood they were known as Albert’s daughters; they shared a bedroom and a bed, and were often together. Their father’s stories gave republican struggle the intimacy of family history, even as Dolours later questioned parts of the teaching she had received. Her path from protest to armed struggle was not presented as a simple continuation of childhood doctrine: after the violence at Burntollet Bridge, she came to see peaceful marches as inadequate and joining the IRA as a return to the convictions on which her family’s legacy had been built.

A Home Becomes an Organizational Space

In 1971, Dolours approached a local IRA commander and asked to join. Her induction took place in the front room of the Slievegallion Drive house. She raised her right hand and pledged to advance the IRA’s objectives and obey orders from a superior officer. The ceremony unfolded in the family home while Chrissie sat in the next room with a cup of tea, behaving as though she did not know what was happening. The ordinary domestic setting and the formal pledge occupied adjoining rooms: Andersonstown’s political life entered the Price household without displacing its routines.

The sisters continued attending school by day and disappeared at night, sometimes staying away for extended periods. Secrecy was essential because the IRA was banned and membership itself could lead to arrest; parents often did not ask where young people had been. The district also connected private life to the wider republican leadership. In June 1972, after Gerry Adams was released from internment, Dolours and Marian were waiting with a car and drove him into Andersonstown for a meeting with other republican leaders about the possibility of a ceasefire. The same neighbourhood that had sheltered recruitment and local resistance thus served as a point of arrival for high-level political discussion.

Andersonstown also figures in the account of the Unknowns, the IRA unit whose members were selected for an operation in England. The youngest recruit, Roisin McNearney, still lived with her parents in the district before her arrest. After the trial, the IRA gave her a new identity and documents, removed her belongings from her family home, and arranged for them to be sent on after she began a new life. She was never caught again and disappeared from public view. Her story makes the neighbourhood a place of both recruitment and departure, where clandestine activity could reorder a family’s ordinary belongings and address.

Family Aftermath and Return

The district’s history is not confined to the Price household. Allison Morris, the Belfast journalist who interviewed Dolours in 2010, had also grown up in Andersonstown. Her shared background helped connect the interview to the place where Price’s history had begun. Years later, police investigating the 2009 attack on Massereene Barracks traced the phone used to claim responsibility to a purchase at a supermarket in Newtownabbey. CCTV showed Marian Price buying it; the investigation then led armed police to a house in Andersonstown. The location thus reappears in the later history of republican militancy, although Dolours herself did not join the dissident groups committed to continuing violence after the peace agreement.

After Dolours died, the family home on Slievegallion Drive became a place of mourning. In 1975, the Price sisters had been refused compassionate leave from prison to bury their mother. In 2013, Marian was permitted to leave prison for a few hours to attend her sister’s wake in that same house. The next day, black flags hung from lamp posts along Andersonstown Road as Stephen Rea and his sons carried Dolours’s coffin through the rain toward St Agnes’s Church. The route joined the family home to a public funeral, returning the story of a former prisoner and republican organizer to the neighbourhood that had formed her and received her family.

Boundaries and Continuing Significance

The book’s later portrait of Belfast places Andersonstown within a city that had become more peaceful but remained deeply divided. Even nearly two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, peace walls continued to separate neighbourhoods, and their opposing sectarian slurs made the persistence of hostility visible. More than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still attended segregated primary schools; in parts of Belfast, people crossed to a different bus stop to avoid being hassled. In Catholic areas, Irish tricolours and Palestinian flags signaled a continuing sense among many republicans that the North remained occupied. These wider conditions help explain why Andersonstown remains more than a setting for past events: the district belongs to a city where political settlement did not dissolve the everyday geography of division.

Across the narrative, Andersonstown changes from a family address and contested neighbourhood into a place of clandestine organization, political meetings, investigation, and public remembrance. Its streets bind together the Price family’s inherited republicanism, the community’s response to raids, the IRA’s local presence, and the later consequences of armed struggle. The return to Slievegallion Drive for Dolours’s wake gives that geography a final, intimate measure: the same home that had contained her induction also received her in death.